environment + technology

Sierra Club goes for the green in for-profit venture

At Fortune’s recent Brainstorm Green conference, Green Wombat had a chance to get a guided tour of Sierra Club Green Home — the new for-profit online venture of the venerable Sierra Club — from Jennifer Schwab, the startup’s sustainability director.

As interesting as the site is the business model being pursued by the 117-year-old non-profit. As I wrote in my Green State column on Grist:

It’s not unusual these days for big green groups to get in bed with business, but one of the oldest and most-respected environmental organizations—the Sierra Club—is going them one better by getting into business itself.

The San Francisco-based Sierra Club has launched a for-profit online venture called Sierra Club Green Home as a one-stop shop for information and services to green up your lifestyle and decarbonize your abode.

Sierra Club Green Home is a joint venture between the 117-year-old institution and a group of individual investors—or “donors” as they like to call themselves. “It’s the social entrepreneurship model,” says Gordon Wangers, the company’s marketing chief and one of the donor/investors. “A non-profit finds some enterprising business types who are committed to a cause but bring business savvy to a venture and have the skills and wherewithal to run it.”

Wangers thinks it’s a model for other green groups as the economic collapse zaps the fortunes of their well-heeled donors.

About Green Wombat

Green Wombat is written by
Todd Woody, a veteran environmental journalist based in California who writes for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Grist and Yale e360. He's one of the few people on the planet who have held a northern hairy-nosed wombat in the wild.

Todd formerly was a senior editor at Fortune magazine, an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 magazine and the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News.